Decision-making framework for response and management of environmental disasters (FRaMED)

Climate change, episodic extreme events, and human-derived non-climatic stressors pose a large threat to natural resources, particularly for niche specialists and species in decline or near range limits. Consequently, natural resource managers must be responsive to environmental disasters, strive to minimize impacts to natural resources, and assess the costs and benefits of management actions. We present two case studies of how managers responded to two different environmental disasters affecting an endangered marine mollusk in California, U.S.A. The first study was a response to a massive landslide, which initially buried some black abalone and their critical habitat, and then slowly expanded up and down the adjacent coastline. The second study was a response to multiple debris flows, generated when a wildfire was quickly followed by an atmospheric river, which also directly buried black abalone populations at watershed outlets and then expanded up- and down-coast. From these two environmental disasters, we developed a suite of materials to facilitate future response operations, including the Framework for Response and Management of Environmental Disasters (FRaMED) presented here. FRaMED was intentionally designed to broadly apply to myriad resources (e.g., species, habitats, ecosystems) and environmental threats (e.g., wildfires, debris flows, oil spills). Moreover, FRaMED is purposefully flexible, enabling managers to adjust actions during and between environmental disasters. Finally, FRaMED can support managers in one-off disasters or in developing detailed response materials for recurring disasters.